At work I was given a Dell Lattitude E6320 laptop (64-bit) with Windows 7 installed on it. I used it for a few months (with no problems using wired or wireless networking) and then decided to gut the OS and replace it with Ubuntu Desktop 12.04. And I loved it.

The only problem was: I lost (or thought I lost) all wireless capabilities. All of the sudden, wireless was disabled on my machine, and as such, I couldn't find any of the wireless networks I was used to using.

Last week, a co-worker recommended trying sudo modprobe wl because he thought it might be my Broadcom wifi drivers; I gave it a try and it works. So now, in order to have wifi, I need to run sudo modprobe wl.

Why (specifically)? Are these drivers not supported in the Ubuntu repositories for some reason?